Shah and some of the other presenters had a lot to say about culture, what it means and how it’s an integral part of the success – or failure – of your business. Shah said that the top predictor of success for any marketing team “is absolutely the people.” And a healthy culture is what attracts and retains the best talent.

Defining culture

Shah has spent a lot of time thinking about and developing HubSpot’s culture, as evident from the company’s Culture Code slide deck. The 127-slide “part manifesto and part employee handbook” has been viewed more than 1.3 million times, which suggests other people are thinking a lot about culture, too.

So what is culture? Is it a ping-pong table, an office keg or a relaxed dress code? Those perks may be part of your culture, but they don’t define it.

Dan Fahrner, director of web marketing services for SmallBox, said culture is a combination of a company’s core values, organizational health, and employee experience. Employee experience includes the ping-pong tables and other perks that many people mistake for culture. But core values and organizational health are the underpinnings of a thriving culture.

Employees need to know what values their company embraces (at SmallBox, Fahrner said, those values are persistence, curiosity, collaboration, and courage). Organizational health includes attributes such as cohesive leadership, organizational clarity, and human resources systems that support organizational clarity and the company’s values.

And this is one of the main reasons culture matters: Happy employees can be your best brand ambassadors.

“Your customers and your employees have control of your brand, so why not empower them with your culture?” Fahrner said.

Building happiness

Shah said employees value transparency and access to information. That’s why HubSpot gives its employees access to a wealth of company information, via an exhaustive internal Wiki. Making that information accessible for employees – even if they never read it – supports clarity and organizational health.

Fahrner pointed out that employees also want ownership of their cultural institutions, and it’s easy to provide them that opportunity. For example, managers can step aside to let employees lead their own meetings

If you have a company blog, let everyone have a voice by encouraging all employees to contribute. And if some employees are uncomfortable writing for an audience, Fahrner said co-authorship – which partners reluctant bloggers with peer collaborators – may help people get started.

Resolving conflict

Clarity, communication, and team alignment can help dispel the kind of workplace angst that undermines culture and drives away good talent. Particularly in a business with both a marketing and sales team, a lack of understanding and communication can hinder a company’s growth.

Brian Kavicky, vice president of Lushin, a company that helps businesses strengthen sales efforts, spoke to the Go Inbound crowd about the common disconnect between marketing and sales departments. Often, he said, sales teams complain that marketing isn’t providing enough leads or the right kind of leads. Marketing teams may complain that sales isn’t following up quickly enough on leads. Kavicky said these two departments should work together, with marketing sitting in on the first sales call to any prospect. Early collaboration can help ensure messaging is aligned across sales and marketing teams.

Defining a vision

If you haven’t thought much about what culture really means, a good place to start is to ask employees if they’re happy, and why. Mel Kleiman, writing for Ragan.com, pointed out that companies should conduct retention interviews, rather than wait until an exit interview to find out why employees are leaving.

Culture is the reason your employees come to work every day. It’s the values they share, the company’s clear and collective vision and how people interact. Focus on creating a great culture, and you can attract and retain the best talent.

The post Company Culture: What it (Really) Is and Why it Matters in Marketing appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Question everything

Blair was an outstanding writer who could describe a scene in such a way that the reader could visualize it. The problem was, that many of the scenes Blair described were loosely based on reality, and not anything he observed. The Times found that Blair had pulled facts from other news organizations – sometimes lifting entire paragraphs from someone else’s work, with no attribution. So how do you know if the content you’re reading is genuine, error-free, and reliable? You can start with a few of these strategies:

• Copy and paste the text into Google search. Even if you think it’s unlikely your client plagiarized content, you may be unaware of how many people have worked on that piece before you see it, and what level of understanding they have about proper attribution. If the content does contain verbatim text from another source, your Google search will find a match.
• Verify the spelling of all names, ages, and proper nouns. When you ask the writer (or whoever has given you the content) to verify a fact, “I think so,” is never an acceptable answer. When in doubt, it’s OK to call sources and ask them to verify their information.
• Trust your gut. The Times reported that early on in Blair’s career, some senior editors expressed concerns about the number of careless errors in his copy, with one editor suggesting Blair be terminated. Instead, he began covering national news. After Blair resigned, the Times found that Blair was inventing facts for his reporting before he moved to the national desk. If concerned editors had dug deeper into Blair’s errors, they might have uncovered the truth.
• Do the math. Errors happen, usually unintentionally. Never assume that numbers and statistics are correct – do the math yourself. If you’re reading a white paper that says a study of 2,500 college freshmen reveals that 20 percent – or 700 of them – use tobacco, something is amiss.

What people did and didn’t say

Misquoting someone is a surefire way to draw negative attention. So if you’re promoting content that contains quotes, review them with scrutiny. Listen to how someone talks, and you’ll notice very few people speak in neat, quotable sentences. Often, people will speak in stops and starts, switching topics, adding asides, and pausing for dramatic effect. So when you’re looking at a quote, if it seems perfectly eloquent, it may be incorrect. Some corporate communications, including press releases, might contain “canned quotes” – or, pithy remarks some PR person drafted on behalf of a company bigwig. If that’s the case, just ask if the person who allegedly uttered the quote has seen it and approved of it.

Proofread, or go home

Always proofread content. Read it once, then read it again, starting with the last sentence and working backward to the beginning. Even if you don’t find errors, you may see an opportunity to strengthen the article. The Times recovered from Blair’s phony stories, but because he was able to deceive everyone for so long, the newspaper lost some of its credibility. Readers had no way to discern whether any story in the paper was accurate. In content marketing, you earn credibility by offering flawless content, so tell your clients that reviewing their work is essential to what you’re trying to accomplish for them.

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